


Love and Families in SPN

by yourlibrarian



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s05e06 I Believe The Children Are Our Future, Episode: s05e12 Swap Meat, Gen, Love, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-09
Updated: 2016-05-09
Packaged: 2018-06-07 12:05:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6803293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourlibrarian/pseuds/yourlibrarian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With all the talk about Dean and Sam's distance in S5, I kept thinking about the issue of Dean's need for mimicry and what it meant for him as a character, and what it might also say about emotional ties in the family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love and Families in SPN

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted March 5, 2010

I've been musing on something that I haven't seen anyone raise regarding the issue of family, namely, that it dies out if it's not propagated. So what if the end purpose of the apocalypse, at least on the angel side, is to create new angels, to be able to do what only humans and other animals were given the ability to do? If Jesse is super powerful because he is the product of a demon and human, what about an angel and human? Wouldn't such a child be even more powerful since angels are more powerful than demons? And it's not like we haven't seen angel/human couplings in biblical lore. What if the end result of this apocalypse is to create a new race of beings who will, given their power, easily remake the earth?

This is perhaps an incongruous lead-in to the other topic I wanted to discuss, that of love in the SPN verse

With all the talk about Dean and Sam's distance in S5, I kept thinking about the issue of Dean's need for mimicry and what it meant for him as a character, and what it might also say about emotional ties in the family. One of the issues hit on in Swap Meat was how well Dean responds to someone mirroring all his tastes and behaviors. Of course, in 5.12 it also led him to realize that Gary was not Sam because Sam _doesn't_ do that. I think more than a few people instantly related this to SaV in S4 when the Siren gets under Dean's guard by providing the sort of approving admiration that Sam probably never gave in quite the way Dean would have liked. John almost certainly didn't provide that admiration either.

However, I do wonder if John provided approval when Dean mirrored his tastes. After all, having children is a pretty narcissistic thing to do and there's evidence that [it's a big driver in parental preferences for children](http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/black-babies-boys-less-likely-to-be-adopted/). So is this how Dean learned about love –- that it only exists if you want to become a copy of the loved object?

This would certainly tie into Dean's issues with family in general and the need for biological connection. Regardless of what Bobby has said, or what he has ever done for the Winchesters (which has always seemed to me, disproportionate to what they've done for him), Dean doesn't seem to believe that family isn't bound by blood. And this is something Sam has always recognized in him, thus his fears in 4.21 about how Dean's love is conditional, and conditional based less on Sam's behavior than on his relation to Dean. 

We have a lot better idea of what constitutes love to Dean than what constitutes it to Sam. Even though Dean always felt that Sam was the one who was loved in the family, because his father's thoughts and concerns always seemed to center on him, I doubt very much that Sam felt all that loved by John as he grew up. Sam recognized Dean's efforts at total devotion to John, and assumed that this was why John granted Dean the sort of authority that Sam wanted for himself. So I would guess that, for Sam, love means freedom, and respect for another's decisions and capability. This is what Jessica apparently granted him above all. He was ready to marry a woman (and she may have agreed) who knew very little about him because she apparently was willing to give him both privacy and independence from her. And, as we know, she respected his abilities and decision making. In short, she gave Sam everything he hadn't gotten from Dean and John, and, if Sam's to be believed in 5.03, he's never found anything to replace that.

So, interestingly, Dean and Sam at first seem to define love in completely _opposite_ ways. For Dean, it's conformity to the max, and with Sam it's independence and privacy. But in other respects, love has some similar features for both. Dean and Sam each expect unquestioning loyalty, and also demand a very one-sided sort of relationship. After all, if Sam is basically hiding himself from his partner, and Dean is simply being mirrored by his partner (I use partner in a general, not romantic sense), in neither case is the partnership equal where both parties are well known and understood by the other. Such an arrangement demands a lot of trust in the case of Sam's partner, and a self-effacement of the other partner in loyalty to Dean. We don't have to look far though, to realize who modeled for both of them the idea that love can only exist with unquestioning loyalty and one-sidedness.


End file.
